A little bit of minor surgery on the computer this week. Its a home built job and when I first put it together it had that typical jet engine roar going. Over the last year or so it had undergone a few modifications and finally I have it down to a gentle background hum!

First was getting rid of the motherboard chipset fan. That was replaced with a Zalman northbridge heatsink. Just as well really, the first fan failed and the replacement was at deaths door. Don’t know why they bother with them really.

Took a while for the next step, but that was an Antec Sonata case and a Zalman CPU cooler. They did wonders together, but that was about when I noticed that the VGA card fan made the most terrible whine. So last week I finally got sick of it and got myself a noiseless Zalman VGA cooler (do you see any theme here?!).

The only problem with all of this is that I have noticed once you get rid of a noise you find another one behind it that is just as irritating. No wonder the PC shops are stocking so many of these noise reduction parts now. It must make wonderful business!